Episódios
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Robert Bresson makes a prison escape film is the sort of premise that we cannot help but fall for, particularly as A Man Escaped (1956) is also our favorite sub-genre of crime film: the criminal procedural. While we really fell in love (sort of) with the "full Bresson" of Au hasard Balthazar or Mouchette, both a decade later, A Man Escaped takes Bresson's style into a genre we weren't expecting, and it is perfect.
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Our hopes were so high for Ministry of Fear (1944). Sure, Carol Reed is the best at adapting Graham Greene novels, but Fritz Lang? He's just one of the best European directors there is. Lang adapting Greene? Making a movie called Ministry of Fear in 1944? We didn't think anything could go wrong. Enter Seton I. Miller, executive producer and screenwriter, a dangerous combination in normal circumstances, but when dealing with a director who famously had little regard for the script, the end result is...not great?
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Sociologist Edgar Morin and anthropological filmmaker Jean Rouch join forces for the Québécois filmmaker Michel Brault to turn their ethnographic lens on the empirical core and create the foundational text of cinéma vérité. It may be that this is the most truthful a French (or any) documentary had been up to this point, but the film's subjects often seem to be holding back, with many speaking in abstractions about the current political situations. The lack of honesty is further underscored by Criterion including Un été + 50 (2001), a 50-years-later followup where everyone can be a lot more upfront about their political associations, associations that probably would have landed them in jail or worse if mentioned in the original film. And while perfectly understandable -- we also would not like to be in French prison -- it still leaves us wanting for much of the film.
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Probably the best acted, best scored, best directed, most beautiful, self-serving justification of being a traitorous jerk ever put to film, Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954) could have been better if it was more true to the real life events that inspired it and less a justification for naming names to the House Unamerican Activities Committtee. Thank the unions and enjoy your May Day weekend by watching the best movie with the worst politics, or watch Salt of the Earth instead, a film that came out the same year but from people who were named instead of the people doing the naming of names. But we already talked about Salt of the Earth on our Patreon, so now we gotta talk about On the Waterfront.
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Similar to the ways that Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's Rosetta (1999) reminded us of a modern day version of Breson's Mouchette, their film The Kid with a Bike (2011) feels like an updated The 400 Blows. Of course, the Dardenne's bring their unique style to the story of Cyril and Samantha, once again ending not with an established community, but a shaky hope of one, if we want it.
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Keisuke Kinoshita's The Ballad of Narayama is a film about enforced austerity, about capitulating to the fascist power structures, about how we can be conditioned into killing ourselves even without a boot directly on our neck because that's the status quo. It's about what we do to others and to ourselves not because we have to but because we've been conditioned to think we have to. "Its power seems inescapable."
Also it's an atmospheric fairy tale telling of a of a folkloric practice, a forced abandonment of our most vulnerable, even when they're not really that vulnerable.
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Wim Wenders had planned for years with German Neo-expressionist choreographer Pina Bausch to make a film of her work, but Wenders didn't know how he could do it justice. Then he saw U2 3D (2008) and knew that digital 3D was the technology he needed. Unfortunately, as technology caught up to Wenders' vision, Bausch passed away, and Pina (2011) morphed from just a document of her work into a tribute from Wenders and Bausch's dance troupe. What they create together is an overwhelming piece of art.
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In the first 140 Spines of the Criterion Collection there were five Alfred Hitchcock films, leading us to believe we'd be seeing a lot more from him over the years, but it turns out The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) is the first Hitchcock we've watched for the podcast in just shy of a decade.
This is the original The Man Who Knew Too Much, one of Alfred's first big breaks before moving to Hollywood and the movie that introduced Peter Lorre to English speaking audiences. It's a tight little thriller that may also involve a dog turning into a man and getting arrested.
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While the first two films in Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi Trilogy were built on filming in particularly locations, in Naqoyqatsi, the image itself becomes the location as editor and "digital cinematographer" Jon Kane takes us into the simulation that is modern life. Unfortunately, like the early unused setpiece footage from Koyaanisqatsi, the tech here has not aged well, though this time Reggio doesn't seem to realize its cheesiness.
Sadly, we lost take one of this conversation and Jonathan Hape was not able to join us for the re-recording. He added a lot to our discussion of the first two Qatsi films, and we wish it could have worked out. You should still go to https://www.jonathan-hape.com/ and check out his music.
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We continue through Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi Trilogy with 1988's Powaqqatsi. Reggio works with Phillip Glass again but they lost Ron Fricke for this one and his absence is felt, particularly in the editing. While the first film looked at what US industrialization has done to its own people, Powaqqatsi travels around the world to look at the effects of industrialization on postcolonial peoples.
Jonathan Hape joins us again for this journey, and along the way we talk about Reggio's Christian Anarchist and anarcho-primitivist influences, the 1990 Time Warner Earth Day Special, and Roger Ebert missing the point.
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We start into Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi Trilogy this week with what many consider the strongest of the three films, mostly because Ron Fricke's cinematography and editing is masterful in it. Built from scenes of natural beauty and alienating industry with a phenomenal sountrack by Philip Glass, Koyaanisqatsi is a deeply effecting visual poem.
Our dear friend Jonathan Hape (https://www.jonathan-hape.com/) joins us for the entire trilogy (probably).
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Christopher Nolan's first feature, Following (1998) is a neo-noir with an achronological story structure. The man loves a neo-noir with an achronological story structure. Nolan describes the film as the pinnacle of what he could achieve in a low budget and just working with his friends. which is damning if true because it's just not very interesting.
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René Clément's 1960 adaptation of the 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, Purple Noon is seems to find the director and screenwriter Paul Gégauff trying to drain the homoeroticism out of the source material. Fortunately, cinematographer Henri Decaë and star Alain Delon (in his breakout role) knew how to add it back in through both Delon's fantastic facial acting and some of the most erotic shots of a shirtless man ever to be put to film.
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After Micheal Cimino's The Deer Hunter won five Oscars, United Artists gave him carte blanche for his next film and he really went to town. As in he built and rebuilt at least one whole town, on stilts in a National Park so as not to damage the landscape. If only he'd waited 45 years he could have just bought Glacier National Park outright and really become his film's villains. Anyway, the film was hemorrhaging money is what I'm saying, and is all the better for it.
A slight fictionalization of the historical Johnson County War, Heaven's Gate (1980) is a beautifully shot epic western where Cimino sought to just tell the stories of real people and forgot that talking about real people in their historical context is what historical materialism is. Cimino's seemingly accidental Marxism was not lost on star Kris Kristofferson, and Cimino even changed some details to ratchet up the class conflict that was, historically, already at a fever pitch.
And, hey, it's not often that the historical villains we see in our Criterion films are still around and even have a website that glosses over their government-approved extrajudicial mass murders. "Guardians of Wyoming's Cow Country since 1872" and still shaping society 150 years later, because that's what happens when you don't stop greedy men from seizing absolute power.
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Jean-Luc Godard's goodbye to cinema, at least for a time, Weekend (1967) is not just a condemnation of bourgeois values, but a stunning attack on automobile culture. Sure the messaging is scattershot at best, but there's little in the film that isn't memorable. And it's gotta be hands down the film with the largest salvaged car budget.
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The last of Pasolini's Arabian Nights betrays a director who is steadily on his way to making Salò, and he would begin work on that magnum opus just after he finished Arabian Nights. Like the previous two films in this trilogy, Arabian Nights adapts a well known collection of stories with a heavy focus on the most erotic ones. Pat argues that unlike the others Arabian Nights feels more dour, less fun. Adam's not so sure. But in either case Arabian Nights is filled with memorable and provocative images, like the dildo arrow.
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Continuing through Pasolini's Trilogy of Life this week we have The Canterbury Tales (1972). Pasolini's adaptation of a a foundational English text includes many naked and British people, including Tom Baker. While the film's epilogue changes the book to make these tales "told only for the pleasure of telling", Pasolini's celebration of pre-consumerism sex comes with a certain growing darkness. We'll talk more on that next week, but for now let's enjoy medieval Charlie Chaplin.
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Spine 631 is a boxset of Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Trilogy of Life", a collection of adaptations of collections of stories. We kick it off this week with The Decamaron, based on Giovanni Boccaccio's 14th century collection of tragic and erotic stories. Pasolini adapts these as celebrations of pre-capitalist, pre-consumerist sex, language, and dentistry. Pasolini's Decamaron is very horny, and very fun. We can't wait to see what he does in the rest of the Trilogy of Life
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Roman Polanski adapts Ira Levin's 1967 novel into this 1968 film, though adapts may not be the right word. Transcribes, maybe? The original cut was a very faithful transference of the source material into the film medium, perhaps more faithful than any novel to film adaptation has ever been. Then he let someone else edit it down to a reasonable movie.
Mia Farrow is great in it, perhaps because her personal life married to Frank Sinatra was pretty close to Rosemary's story. John Cassavetes is great in it despite Polanski's best efforts to reign him in. And I know have a least favorite cinematic satan to add to the list.
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John Schlesinger's Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) is a deeply personal work, presaging New Hollywood while making something neither New Hollywood or the British New Wave would dare. We meet a middle-aged doctor, Daniel, and a 30 something divorced woman, Alex, who are both dating Bob, a young artist who makes them both feel alive even if he's a self-centered jerk most of the time. Like the average non-Lubitsch film about polyamory, this relationship is obviously doomed, but the exploration of Daniel and Alex's emotional journey in their final week with Bob is exquisite. Plus, we get to meet some of the most wonderfully precocious we've ever seen in a Criterion picture.
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